hi,
My only contribution to this shall be this. I am irritated at a PoV
being pushed on the list sometimes that FOSS is the best way of doing
things. People who edit Wikipedia comes from various backgrounds and
FOSS advocates on this list have pushed me towards Microsoft products
and I've found that some of their products are better than FOSS
alternatives. Eg. MS Office.
The outburst above is irrational.
MediaWiki is FOSS. Perhaps, some technological under-pinnings (server,
bots etc) are FOSS. What makes Wikipedia, and the important content is
contribution by the people. They come from various backgrounds and
belief systems. Not everyone supports FOSS and I am comfortable with
this. We only share a need to share our knowledge and while open stuff
enables it, we're not tied down by it. I do not see the need to bring
time and again, the contributions of FOSS to Wikipedia on several
threads. We acknowledge their contribution, that is all they ask for
when they provide the user with the software. When we took their
software, we did not know that we had to follow their methodologies to
implement Wikipedia as well.
Pradeep
User:Prad2609
Handheld
On 04/01/2012, wheredevelsdare(a)hotmail.com <wheredevelsdare(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
I was not attacking anyone, with reference to the link forwarded, pointing
to this statement:
I think that almost any argument, on any topic, which has premises
beginning with "Jimbo said..." is a pretty weak argument. Surely the
merits of the proposal should be primary, not what I happen to think.
- Jimmy Wales
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2012 14:32:32 +0530
From: gautam(a)prathambooks.org
To: wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] FOSS and Wikipedia
Please attack the argument on merit. Not the person articulating them.
Thank you.
Best,
Gautam
(handheld)
On Jan 4, 2012 2:16 PM, <wheredevelsdare(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
Refer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Argumentum_ad_Jimbonem
From: anivar.aravind(a)gmail.com
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2012 14:06:47 +0530
To: wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimediaindia-l] FOSS and Wikipedia
On Wed, Jan 4, 2012 at 1:57 PM, Gautam John <gautam(a)prathambooks.org> wrote:
On 4 January 2012 13:38, Srikanth Ramakrishnan <rsrikanth05(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
list and off the list. Wikipedia so't wholely
reliant on FOSS, and
will never be. I don't mean to offend anyone
but this is it. Please
comment.
Wikipedia relies on three kinds of openness.
1. The technical openness that makes the platform possible. Mediawiki is
FOSS.
2. The openness of content that makes participatory content creation
possible. CC-BY-SA is one of the two definitive 'open' licenses.
3. The collaboration that is core to Wikipedia is an attribute of most
FOSS projects.
Wikipedia isn't FOSS but it certainly is FOS, at the very least. And
it's important to remember that Wikipedia does not and cannot exist in
a vacuum.
So for the love of Wikipedia, can you guys please stop sniping about
what is and what is not FOSS.
Pointing an old relevant article by Jimmy
http://jimmywales.com/2004/10/21/free-knowledge-requires-free-software-and-…
--
"[It is not] possible to distinguish between 'numerical' and
'nonnumerical'
algorithms, as if numbers were somehow different from other kinds of precise
information." - Donald Knuth
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